


Unfinished Business

by corrielle



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, Gen, Ghosts, I didn't kill anyone else I'm not GRRM, Jack and Anne Process grief very differently, Minor appearance by Eleanor, Ranger Feels, major character death is CANONICAL, one ghost to be exact, ranger crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:13:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8431423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corrielle/pseuds/corrielle
Summary: Charles Vane is dead. That much is certain.  Jack and Anne come to terms with Charles' death, and with the fact that they can't shake the feeling his spirit still with them.





	1. The Non-Believer

Jack Rackham did not believe in ghosts.  To believe in spirits piercing the veil between the living and the dead and coming back from the great beyond rested on the assumption that there _was_ a “great beyond,” which, to him, implied some powerful entity with the power to say who came and who went.  A god.  And Jack Rackham did _not_ believe in God.  He’d left his faith in the church where he’d buried his father.  What he did believe was that mankind had been afraid since the first moment a man had understood death and put a name to it, and the human mind invented God and the devil as vessels for their awe and their fear.  He understood the impulse.  He also knew it was irrational.  Wanting to believe a part of him would go on after his body was bones in the sand didn’t make it true.

Knowing all of this did make it hard on him when the _feeling_ started.  It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on.  It was, and he hated the terrible lack of specificity in the word, a _presence._   It was being alone in the tent he shared with Anne, or their cabin when they were at sea, every nerve in his body screaming that he was _not_ alone.  That if he turned around, there would be another person there, simply waiting for him to notice.  Jack got a great deal of practice turning quickly, just in case he could catch a glimpse of… whatever it was.  Just in case there really was someone playing an elaborate trick on him.  Someone who could walk through walls or get through a locked door silently in the time it took Jack to do an about-face. He never saw anything. 

He felt it when he was with Anne, too.  Sometimes, when the two of them would sit by their fire near the village at night, drinking a measure of rum, it was as if a third person was just outside the circle of the light, about to step in and join them.  As if _whatever it was_ thought it would be welcome. He refused to name it what he thought it was.  Charles was dead, and that was the end of it.

As the days went by, it became clear that during his initial consideration of the subject, he had failed to take into account two reasons the human mind could convince itself that ghosts and spirits walked the earth. Grief was the first.  Jack had never experienced such a powerful desire to believe that the dead were still present, not even at the death of his father.  He was beginning to understand how those who were less rational might let that grief convince them that their loved one wasn’t in the ground or at the bottom of the sea, but at their side, invisible but palpable.   Guilt was the second.  As much as he railed against Eleanor Guthrie as the architect of Charles’ execution, and as much as he hated Rogers, the fact remained that Charles had died saving _him_ because _he_ had chosen to go back to Nassau even though he was free and clear.  Charles would be alive if not for him, and the weight of that knowledge was perhaps enough to make him imagine that Charles was still there with him, that his own carelessness had not separated them entirely.

The only problem with this rationalization was that Anne felt it too.  He knew this, not because they talked about it (he was not ready to admit he was entertaining such a preposterous notion when he had loudly and emphatically stated his beliefs before), but because she started leaving an extra bit of rum and a pinch of tobacco in a pouch next to her place by the fire some nights.  The first time she did it, she looked at him as if daring him to say something, but he just shrugged and kept his mouth shut, secretly relieved that he wasn’t the only one who sensed it, and even more relieved she didn’t press him to talk about it.

The first day _the presence_ (he still refused to call it Charles) did more than watch, Jack was on a raid.  The ship’s crew and captain were subdued, and he had the ship’s ledger in hand as he searched for hiding places that might contain unrecorded valuables.  He’d swept the captain’s cabin thoroughly, and he was about to move on, when he tripped over his own feet.  It was the only logical explanation.  It hurt his pride to admit it (he didn’t have Anne’s grace or Charles’ strength, but he wasn’t a complete bumbling idiot… or usually he wasn’t), but it _must_ have been a moment of clumsiness. There was nothing in his path, and he was alone in the cabin.  There was no one there who could have stuck out an ankle for him to stumble over.   It had felt _exactly_ like that, though.  As if someone had _wanted_ him to stumble, _wanted_ his eyes to be drawn to a suspiciously unnatural-looking knot in the wood in the beam near the floor.  When pressed, the knot opened a secret compartment in which the captain had hidden pearls, gems, and a small quantity of gold.  It was a rich haul, and one that would add considerably to their war chest.  And Jack would have missed it if he had not stumbled.

“Thanks for that,” Jack murmured to the empty cabin before he shut the door behind him and went to show the others what he’d found. 

He had even more reason to be thankful a week later when he found himself in the middle of a fierce fight.  Someone (Jack liked to blame Rogers) had gotten clever, and the soldiers had managed to keep quiet and hidden until the pirates thought they were in possession of the ship, only to be suddenly engaged in close combat with an entire platoon of marines. 

Jack was not a fighter.  He knew this. Everyone knew this.  “Some men have minds, others have swords,” he’d said to Charles on a long-ago day as he tried to talk his way onto Charles’ crew. They were words Charles had reminded him of on several occasions when Jack had bemoaned his lack of brawn.  (For her part, Anne mostly just scowled at him, as if his desire not to be dependent on his friends for protection was a personal affront to her abilities.)

But Charles was dead, Anne was on the other side of the ship, and Jack was staring down the bayonet of a marine who looked to be at least as tall and broad as Teach, if not as bushy.  _You fight like a cat with its back up when you’re cornered, Jack,_ he reminded himself. Anne had said that to him once, but the best he could hope for in _this_ corner was to swipe the nose of the hellhound in front of him before it locked its jaws around his neck and shook the life out of him.  _No,_ the best he could hope for was not to get skewered before the rest of the crew heard the commotion and came to their comrades’ aid.

Jack dodged and blocked and ducked as best he could, trying to take the second half of what Anne had said to him into account. _So don’t try anything fancy. Just stay alive ‘til I get there._ The marine, likely sensing he had the upper hand, pressed Jack hard.  He took a step back, and felt wood against his spine. For a moment, he could just _see_ Charles’ disapproving face. _“You let your opponent back you into the wall,” you say.  Where else was I supposed to go?_

What happened next happened very quickly. The marine, who had long since switched from bayonet to the sword, lunged forward, intent on making Jack one more casualty of Imperial Britain’s domination of the Caribbean.  But the blow never struck home.  Instead, Jack was pushed out of the way by nothing at all.  And it _was_ nothing. Every other man on Jack’s crew was too busy fighting for his own life to pay Jack’s predicament much mind, and it hadn’t been so much the feeling of a human hand or a body colliding with his as a wall of air sweeping him to one side.  Whatever it was, it pushed him straight into the back of another British soldier, knocking the man off balance long enough that a pirate could put a sword between his ribs.  The marine’s momentum carried him forward, but since Jack wasn’t there, he stumbled, the blow intended for Jack sinking into the timbers of the hull instead.  Jack scrambled to right himself, and somehow managed to put his own sword in the marine’s gut before his opponent freed his weapon.    

And then the rest of the crew were there, and Anne was with them, and the fight was less one-sided.  In the end, the butcher’s bill was relatively light, given the circumstances. One man from Flint’s crew killed, one arm lost, and one of Madi’s men with a belly wound that likely wouldn’t last the night.

“They told me you had a kill,” Anne said, after it was all done and the bodies were being weighted and put overboard. “Which one?”

“That one,” Jack said, indicating the marine, who somehow looked like even more of a mountain in death.

He wasn’t even offended that she looked surprised.  “I’ll tell you later,” he promised.


	2. The Agnostic

Anne Bonny wasn’t sure what she believed.  She thought Jack probably had the right of it when it came to the Christian God, but where they parted ways is when he assumed that just because the god he’d grown up with wasn’t real, nothing was.  Theology didn’t come up much in conversations between them, though, so it was a difference she would have been happy to let lie, if things had been normal.

Trouble was, things were not normal.   

Anne didn’t talk much, and so she knew what it felt like when she was sitting, just quiet, with a person.  With Jack, there was always a feeling of a busy mind working, of silence just about to be broken.  With Max, it had been the tacit assurance that Anne didn’t have to speak, but she’d be heard if she did. With Charles, it had been a mutual agreement that most people talked too much, mixed in with relief at having a friend with whom they could drink in peace.  It was more than, that, though.  It was also a shared watchfulness, a knowledge that Charles had her back and she had his.  

And all of those things, that exact mixture of feelings and familiar, bone-deep knowing were telling her that Charles Vane should be sitting right next to her, that she could turn her head and he’d be there beside her, rum in hand, contented, watchful expression on his face.  The first time she felt it, she turned without thinking, and when he wasn’t there, the sharp pain of his loss flared up again in a way it hadn’t done since the day they’d gotten word of his death.

She wanted to ask Jack if he felt it too, but he was likely to dismiss it as impossible even if he did feel it, so she kept quiet about it.  She didn’t want to fight, and if the word “fancy” left Jack’s mouth, a fight there would be.  Instead, she waited to see if it kept happening.  It did. 

“I know you’re there,” she said quietly one night when the feeling was especially strong.  Jack was already asleep, and when he didn’t stir, Anne added, “Come sit with us whenever you want.” 

Charles’ unseen presence seemed to settle in after that.  She felt him at her side as she walked through the maroon village, and she sometimes felt him at her shoulder in the calm before a raid. 

She was glad to know he was there, but it bothered her that she was acting like he _wasn’t._  It wasn’t right that Charles clearly wanted her to notice him, and she was doing nothing for him in return.  The trouble was, she’d never given much thought to how to make a ghost feel welcome.  She’d seen other sailors whose superstition didn’t run to fear do it.  Some men lit candles and prayed the rosary, others burned bits of paper.  Many of them left bits of food or small gifts.  Most of them offered rum.  The most important thing, she decided, was to give the ghost something he would have wanted in life.  That seemed simple enough. 

Charles had liked rum and tobacco, and she had both, so one night, without any ceremony, she set out an extra glass with a bit of rum in the bottom, dropped a pinch of tobacco into a pouch, tied it closed, and put it next to the glass.  It felt right.

Jack watched her do all of this without saying a word.  He knew who she was doing it for.  It was written all over his face.  _Don’t be a coward, Jack.  Even if you think I’ve gone mad. Say it.  Maybe I’m just grieving.  I know you still are.  Say something._ He didn’t. He looked like a man trying not to start a fight, so she didn’t blame him for not speaking up. Instead, he continued on with their evening as if she hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, though he did get a startled look on his face each time his gaze landed on the things she’d left out for Charles. 

He wasn’t with her always, or at least she didn’t think he was.  She would feel alone one moment and not the next, and she’d know that he was there, or she’d feel the warning tingle between her shoulder blades that told her someone had come up behind her.  After a while, she started feeling him with her when she went on raids.  It wasn’t the same as having him there with a real sword in hand.  For one thing, she wasn’t sure what Charles could do and what he couldn’t, and he hadn’t found a way to tell her.  Still, the presence she felt over her left shoulder as she climbed over the railing of an enemy ship had to be good for something.

As it turned out, Jack was the one who proved her right.

The ship had looked like an easy prize – a merchant, and only lightly manned from what she could see.  The bigger danger would be from the guns, even after the boarding party was away.    

“I’m not the one who needs minding,” she said when she felt Charles approach.  “Look out for Jack today, would you?”

For a moment, she could almost see Charles’ sullen expression at being kept away from the fight, but then he was gone.  When the prize ship struck its colors without much resistance, she thought they’d been lucky, or that their reputations were working for them.  Charles didn’t come back when the fight was over, and she guessed he’d found better things to do than watch them strip the prize and sail back to port.  Then, she heard the shouting, and the unmistakable sound of steel on steel. It was coming from below, and Jack had gone down into the hold to take stock of the prize.

Others who had been closer to the sound beat her below decks, but she was right on their heels. There were some British dead already when she got there, and her crewmates were holding their own, but she helped them put a quicker end to the fight.  She found Jack after, looking pale and harried, but unhurt. 

“You all right?” she asked.

Jack put one hand to his own cheek, and it came away smeared with blood (not his own, or she’d have noticed). 

“I appear to be,” he said.

When she asked about his kill when they were back on deck, he went pale again and promised to tell her later, which was odd for Jack.  Usually, he liked talking about his brushes with death about as much as she hated talking about hers.

It was only later, when they were alone, that she found out why.  She was setting out Charles’ rum and tobacco, like she’d been doing for days. 

“It’s for Charles, isn’t it,” Jack said.  It wasn’t a question.

She uncorked the rum.  “Who else would it be for?”

“That’s not what I meant.  I mean… of course it’s for Charles, but… you do that because he’s _here.”_ Jack pointed at the ground under his feet, then moved his finger in a circle.  “Near us, around us…” Anne just stared at him.  He didn’t seem to be making fun, but she wasn’t going to say anything until she was sure, and the one way to be certain of what Jack really thought was to let him talk until he got it out.  “Don’t… don’t look at me like that.  I’m not making light of your ritual, and I’m not making fun.  I’m saying that… I feel it. The reason you’re doing it.  I feel him too.”

“This is about what you said you’d tell me later?”

“This is about how I should have been dead before you got there,” Jack said. “Close quarters, outmatched and outweighed… that marine should have killed me, and he nearly did.”

Anne scooted closer to him.  Jack was usually all flourishes and well-timed pauses for his audience to admire a story well-told.  This was Just What Happened, and that meant it had scared him.  It also meant he wasn’t exaggerating, and that scared her too.  It was bad enough Charles was gone.  Losing Jack too didn’t bear thinking about, but to hear him tell it, she almost had.

“Something pushed me out of the way, and it wasn’t another man, it wasn’t a pitch of the ship because no one else so much as noticed it.  It was like… being swiped aside by a giant hand the moment before the sword came down where my neck should have been.”  He put a hand to his throat and felt the skin of his neck as if still surprised to find it whole.

“And you think it was him,” Anne said.

“As you said, who else would it be?  I can’t think of anyone else who would take an interest, can you?  No, unless some spirit entirely unknown to me before has decided my life is worth saving… unlikely, if you ask me… it must be him.”

“I think so too,” Anne said. “Besides, I knew he was with me earlier.  Asked him to watch out for you.  I’m glad he listened.”

“You talk to him? Ask him things?” Jack asked.

She shrugged.  “Sometimes.” 

“Is he…” Jack motioned at Charles’ cup of rum.  “Is he there? Do you see him?”  He squinted at the spot, as if looking more carefully would show him something he hadn’t noticed before.

“Haven’t yet.  You?”

“No.  And I’ve looked.” He sounded broken up when he said it, so Anne moved closer, until the top of her shoulder brushed against his arm, and her legs stretched out next to his.    

He rested his cheek on the top of her head, and the two of them were quiet for a long while, the only sound the crackling of the fire, the wind in the trees, and distant voices from the camps and the village. 

The silence was broken when Jack sat up abruptly.  “You don’t suppose he’s here to ensure I make the best of it…”  

“What?  Why’d he do that?” Anne asked.  She’d been half asleep, and her hand had gone to her knife when Jack had moved so quickly.  She unclenched her fingers from around the hilt. 

Jack sat up and leaned forward, eyes trained on some point in the distance.

“If I were Charles, and I had just given my life for Nassau generally and my good friend Jack specifically, I’d want to know my sacrifice was worth it.  That the people I’d died for weren’t going to muck it up and get killed a few weeks later.” 

“Maybe.  Maybe he’s just watching out for us as best he can because he can’t be here,” Anne said.  Trust Jack to make the fact that their dead friend’s ghost was looking out for them more complicated than it was.

“And maybe he’s having second thoughts and making the best of a decision he regrets.  A decision everyone else regrets, too.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We all know that his life for mine is not a trade that any pirate in Nassau would have made, given the choice,” Jack said.    

He was getting under her skin now, the way he did when he was worrying at something that kept him up nights, so he had to share it with _her_ and keep her up nights, too. 

“Wasn’t their choice. Charles did what he did, and that’s the end,” she insisted.

Jack wasn’t ready to let it go.  “I know the past is beyond our reach, but did you ever wonder, even for a moment, if it wouldn’t have been better if he’d kept his distance from that carriage? Let me go? If he had, the dispossessed pirates of Nassau would still have Charles Vane to look to for strength, but in his place, they have _me_.  It _never_ crossed your mind that this might have been a bad trade?  Never wished it had been me instead of him?”

“You want to know who _I_ would choose.  Between you and him.  Because _you_ feel guilty. So you ask me…” _You ask me to choose between my brother and my partner,_ she was going to say, but the fury rising from the pit of her stomach wouldn’t let her finish. “You _can’t_ ask me that.  _Fuck you, Jack.”_

On “fuck,” Charles’ glass shattered.  There was no wind, and neither of them had touched it.  Anne and Jack stared at the rum as it ran down the rock and into the dirt, staining it dark.

“I think he agrees with you.” Jack’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Fucking right he does,” Anne said.


	3. The Spirit

Charles Vane hated being dead.

At first, it had been a relief. The pain in his leg was gone, for one thing. The waiting was over, for another.  He’d always meant to look death in the eye and meet it on his own terms, but so did most men.  Now, he didn’t have to wonder if he’d have the strength to see it through.  He’d seen the faces of the people in the crowd around his gallows.  He’d seen Billy understand what it was he intended to do for Nassau.  He’d seen the worry that made Eleanor’s stony face a lie. 

It was good, knowing he’d died well, but the satisfaction soon wore thin.  The crowd dispersed, many muttering angrily, a few with pinched, priggish faces that proclaimed Nassau well rid of him. No one saw him standing by his own body.  He could see his own hands when he held them out in front of him, but he was the only one.

He stayed by the body that had been his until nightfall.  Charles hadn’t believed in anything other than his own strength in life, but now that he was dead and faced with proof of the afterlife, he had started thinking about how it might work.  Maybe he needed to stay close to where he’d died. Wait for a guide, or a call into whatever lay on the other side of death.  But nothing came.

He didn’t seem to be tied to his corpse in any way.  He had taken a few experimental steps at first, testing whether he could walk away from it, and he felt nothing holding him back, so when the street darkened and the torches were lit, he walked away from the gallows.  He could still feel the street under his feet, the grain of the wood of a passing cart he reached out to touch.  He could smell salt from the ocean and rum and piss and sweat in the tavern, but when he tried to grasp something in his hands, he slipped right through it.  It was as if, just for him, the laws of nature had been suspended.  He could put his hand on a bottle, feel the glass pitted beneath his fingers, but if he tried to lift it, his hand went _into_ it.  He could feel the glass _in_ his hand, and the rum, as if the insides of him had a sense of touch, same as the outside.

People passed right through him, too. He found that out the hard way. Out of habit, he avoided walking into people at first, moved out of their way when he saw them coming because he knew they could not see him.  So, it was Eleanor who taught him how it felt to have a living person walk through him and out the other side as if he wasn’t there. 

He had sought her out for a host of reasons.  Part of him had gone to her to see if there was any regret under all of her fury.  Lots of people in Nassau were mourning what he’d _meant_ , but he wanted to see someone who knew him better mourning who he _was,_ and despite everything, he knew she would be.  If their parts had been reversed, if he’d been forced to end _her,_ he’d still be grieving. Another angrier part of him had gone to her to see if she was afraid of what he’d started.  To see if, though she thought she’d won, she had any idea of the smoldering fury she’d unleashed when she ordered his death.  Ghosts often had unfinished business, he remembered, and if he had any, it was with her.

When he found her, she was in the governor’s rooms (there was a certain satisfaction in being able to go where he wanted, even through doors were closed against all others).  She was shaken. That was certain, but _he_ was not the only reason, and that realization made jealousy flare up so white hot it felt like he was about to burn up from the inside.  Eleanor was worried for _Rogers,_ and not just out of self-interest.  He knew her well enough to know true affection when he saw it, and the look on her face as she sat at Rogers’ bedside was genuine.  The governor looked half-dead, which only made Charles more convinced that his own death was entirely on Eleanor’s head. Part of him wanted to frighten her more, to be the vengeful, vicious ghost from stories that broke dishes and ripped her thick curtains to shreds and destroyed everything in her rooms that was civilized and fine. 

He tried to pick up a teacup, to dash it against a wall.  Before, he’d been testing the limits of his new existence.  Maybe anger, feeling, that was what was needed to affect the world he was no longer part of.  He concentrated hard, willing his hand to be solid enough that the porcelain wouldn’t pass through his fingers, but nothing happened.  He might as well not have been there at all. 

Unable to get her attention that way, he planted himself in her path when she rose from Rogers’ side and spoke the first words he’d spoken since the hanging.

“ _This_ is what you chose?”

Eleanor paused in the doorway and looked back over her shoulder before gently pulling the door shut behind her.

“He _is_ the world that threw you in that cell, and because he’s the one who let you out of it, you _thank him_ for it?”

She was walking toward him now, and he didn’t move.  She would have to walk through him.  And then, _surely_ she would feel something, there would be some indication he could do more than watch time pass around him.

“You’re better than this, Eleanor,” he said, just before she walked through him.  Her body merged into his for a second, and the way he saw it, she disappeared inside of him before walking out the other side. 

This was different than passing through doors or bottles.   Those things didn’t have life.  He couldn’t feel the pulse of their heart, the structure of their bones, the warmth of their skin _in_ him but separate from him.  Those things didn’t have feelings.  Eleanor did.  As she had passed through him, he had felt, just for a moment, the roiling mixture of grief for him, anger at herself for feeling grief for him layered over grief for her father, worry about the governor, and a determination that was so perfectly _her_.  It was achingly intimate, and he never wanted to do it again.

For the first time, Eleanor seemed to react to him.  She turned sharply and looked behind her, and he looked her in the eye for a moment before she shook her head and went to the governor’s desk, where she seemed at home searching through stacks of paper and scratching notes on the correspondence there.

He tried to summon up the fury he’d felt a few moments before.  The sight of her, so clearly allied with those who would enslave Nassau, should have made him hate her.  But the moment when she passed through him had drained it all away.  He knew what she felt, and she wasn’t selfish or vengeful.  She was determined despite her fear, and he remembered that he’d loved her for that, once, and even though he hated the path she had chosen, he couldn’t find fault with her commitment to it.

He walked around the desk until he was standing behind her.  There was surely a wealth of information spread out in front of her, but there was no one he could relay it to, so he didn’t bother reading any of it.

Careful not to pass through her, he caressed her cheek with the back of his hand, leaned in, and whispered, “You made your choice.  I respect that.  Now you’d best be ready for what comes next.”

It was advice kindly given, and Eleanor seemed to sense it because she put a hand to her cheek and turned so quickly he barely had time to react.  Her face narrowly missed passing right through his, and he found himself across the room.  He hadn’t walked there, he was just… _there._ He had wanted to be away from Eleanor but still in the room, and so he was. 

He felt like a ship whose anchor had been weighed after too long at harbor.  He’d said his piece to Eleanor, and whatever business he had with her was done.  He could have stayed, but for what reason?  He didn’t hate her, and he remembered loving her too much to watch her tend another man.  There were other people he’d rather see.

Once he was outside the governor’s house, he tested his new-found ability to wink between places just by thinking about them.  He went to the tavern, the brothel, the wrecks, the _Ranger’s_ old campsite, and Mrs. Barlow’s house (which was not empty, though the men inside had taken pains to keep the lights from showing through the window).  Charles saw familiar faces, especially at Flint’s woman’s house, but not the two he was looking for.  Finding Jack and Anne was going to be harder than he’d thought.  Of course they weren’t in Nassau any more.  It was for the best, but if they were somewhere he hadn’t gone, he couldn’t join them. That seemed to be how this worked.  He could go to places he’d been in life, or places he’d seen in drawings or heard described. (This is how he ended up in front of the British Parliament building, which he told to go fuck itself before jumping back to Nassau.)

Ships were the answer.  They didn’t stay still, but the _Queen Anne’s Revenge_ looked very much the same in Nassau as it did anywhere else.  She was easy to find.  All he had to do was think of what she looked like below decks, and he was on board.  He had hoped that Blackbeard take him to the rest of the pirate fleet, but it didn’t take Charles long to figure out that Teach had gone ashore at one of his out of the way camps and didn’t plan to set sail any time soon. 

He had more success with Flint’s Spanish warship.  He did not know her as well as the _Revenge,_ so when he appeared on the deck of a ship at anchor just off shore of an island he’d never seen before, he wondered if he’d found the right place.  A long, white beach stretched inland until it turned into thick jungle, and a few tents and fires spread out along the high-tide mark.  There were pirates and smugglers here, sure enough, but were they the ones he sought?  

Now that he could see the island, a thought brought him to it, and as he wandered through the camp, he saw faces he knew, but no Jack or Anne.  He watched for a while, and waited.  There weren’t nearly enough people on the warship or on the beach, and half of those who were on the beach weren’t Nassau men.  The strangers were, to a man, black, and there was a wariness between the strangers and the pirates that spoke of a recent partnership without much trust.  But where were the rest of them?   Some of them had to be inland.  Eventually, Charles listened in on enough conversations to know there was a village well-hidden in the interior, and another of Flint’s men did him the favor of mentioning that Rackham and Bonny were in the thick of the planning for any assault by the British, which meant they had to be nearby. 

Near midnight, one of the maroons set off down a barely visible path into the jungle, and Charles followed him. He tried not to keep too close to his guide. He didn’t want the man getting spooked, and he’d learned that people were most likely to act like they knew he was there when they were alone, or it was dark, or they were scared, or all three. 

“I don’t mean you any harm,” Charles said.  “I just want you to lead me to my friends.” He knew the man couldn’t hear him, but perhaps speaking the words would put his guide at ease.   

After close to an hour of walking a twisting, treacherous path that would have been a hard climb for him if he’d still been alive and wounded, the jungle opened up before him, and he saw the maroon village for the first time.  It was larger than he’d thought it would be, and for this many to hide inland with no sign of their presence visible from sea was no small feat.  If these were the allies Flint had found, they were well worth having.

Most of the pirate crews were camped on the outskirts of the village, and all Charles had to do was seek out the site he would have chosen if he’d been there.  Somewhere protected, dry, good vantage points even if they were among friends.  Sure enough, the flag Jack had been fretting over for months flew over a tent that backed up to a cliff that would be hard to scale and had a clear view of all approaches.  Jack and Anne were sitting outside, backs against an overgrown fallen tree, feeding the small fire near their feet.

Jack looked well.  Not healed completely, but the cut on his face wasn’t red or angry, and he didn’t move like a man who’d survived a wreck of a carriage a few weeks earlier.  Anne looked like she always did, which was such a comfort to Charles he felt himself smiling for the first time since he’d died. 

“Good to see the two of you are getting on without me,” he said, sitting carefully beside Anne.  He could, with effort, sit _on_ things rather than sinking through them.  Neither of them even looked his way, which was all right.  He didn’t need the two of them to notice him, for now.  He’d found them safe and whole, and if he imagined it was a night when he didn’t have much to say, things were very much as they had been.

In the days that followed, Charles stayed with his former crew members when it suited him and explored the village or the camps or the beach when it didn’t.   Once, he went out with Flint and his crew, half _Walrus_ men and half maroons, but not being able to take part in the action was maddening.  Better to be with friends, if he could just let them know he was there. 

Anne sensed him first.  It made sense.  Jack always relied too much on the evidence of his eyes.  Anne was willing to be still, use her instincts to feel a situation out.  Even so, when she turned and looked right at him, a pained expression crossing her sharp features, he was startled.

“Yes.  I’m here.  I’m sorry it pains you, remembering I’m dead, but I need you to know I’m _here,”_ he said, but she looked back at the fire as if he hadn’t spoken at all.  

He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever get her attention.  One night, he decided to try making himself part of their conversation, a third voice they couldn’t hear.  He asked, “You hearing this shit, Anne?” when Jack’s stories strained belief, and he agreed loudly with Jack that Blackbeard was impossible to work with, but necessary.  “Fucking right he is,” Charles said.    

After Jack had gone to sleep, Anne still sat up, toying with her knife, and Charles sat across from her.   He’d missed this, just the two of them, sitting after a long day, not talking, just _being_. 

Without warning, Anne looked up and stared straight at him.  “I know you’re there,” she said. “Come sit with us whenever you want.” 

It was easier with Anne after that, as if all of their silent conversations while he was alive had gotten them ready to understand each other when one of them was dead but lingering.  Jack, though… he was going to be difficult.  He knew Charles was there.  That much was obvious from the speed with which Jack made an about face whenever Charles came up behind him and said, “Ignoring me? Fuck you, Jack.”  But Jack refused to do anything to acknowledge Charles’ presence.  If he hadn’t heard Jack’s go on at length about his disbelief in god or ghosts more times than he could count, Charles would have been hurt.

When Anne started leaving out rum and tobacco for him, Charles was pleased.  For one thing, he didn’t know until she did it how much he’d been craving things that were _his._  For another, the pointed way Anne glared at Jack the whole time she was setting out his things was her way of forcing the issue, and Charles was grateful for it.

Jack didn’t say a word, though, and Charles just shrugged and settled next to Anne, wishing he could smoke some of the tobacco she’d left out.  He settled for passing his hand through it.  He’d found that moving through food or drink or other things he couldn’t have was the next best thing. “You tried,” Charles said.  “It’s not your fault he’s stubborn.”

Later, he was grudgingly grateful that Jack held out so long.  If he hadn’t, Charles would never have figured out how to touch the living without passing through them. 

“If you walk out of this cabin without looking down, you’re leaving the best behind,” Charles said idly, pointing with the toe of a boot at the strange looking knot in the wood of the prize Jack’s crew had just taken.

Jack, as usual, didn’t hear him at all. 

“It’s a good hiding place,” Charles said.  “Clever, like you.”

Jack inspected the captain’s desk carefully, and, finding nothing, made some notations in the ledger he carried with him. 

“It’s not in the desk.  It’s in the floor.   _I_ can see it.  Come _on,_ Jack.  _Look down,”_ Charles said.

Jack was heading for the door now.  In frustration, Charles stuck a leg out into Jack’s path, trying to do what he did when he sat in chairs without falling through them.  All he had to do was remember where _he_ ended and everything else began.  If he could concentrate hard enough, keep that sense of the space he took up in place while Jack tried to walk through him…

Jack tripped, turned, looked around wildly at all corners of the room, and, finding, nothing, the floor.  All at once, his eyes lit up the way they did when he smelled money.

“ _Now_ you see it,” Charles said.

Not two heartbeats later, Jack Rackham, rational disbeliever in all things spiritual, said, “Thanks for that.”

Charles grinned and clapped Jack on the shoulder.  (A gesture that, without Charles’ concentration, Jack couldn’t feel, but it felt right all the same.)

He had to be careful how often he made himself solid.  Doing it once in a day was hard enough, doing it twice made him feel so tired he could barely stir from the camp for days afterward.

He found that out the day he saved Jack’s life and broke the glass Anne had given him.

Having discovered he could be more than a bystander when swords were out, he started going along with Anne when she helped take prizes.  She was more likely to be in the thick of things, and now he knew he could keep a sword from her back if she didn’t see it coming. 

Once, when he came up behind her and looked across the water as they fast closed the distance between them and their quarry, Anne said, “I’m not the one who needs minding.  Look out for Jack today, would you?”

Charles had been looking forward to going over with Anne and the rest of the boarding party, and he felt a momentary sting of disappointment, but something on Anne’s face said she wasn’t asking without cause.

“Fine.  If you think he needs me, I’ll go,” Charles said, stalking off across the deck to find Jack.

Anne had been right to worry, and Charles got to save Jack’s life and help his friend kill a man twice his size, which was a good day’s work for a man two months dead.

That night, Jack finally admitted he knew Charles was still with them.  True, he danced around the subject and piled on more words than were needed, but that was Jack’s way, and for Charles, it was better than being ignored.

However, Jack couldn’t leave a good thing alone. 

“You don’t supposed he’s here to ensure I make the best of it…” Jack said, breaking the companionable silence that had descended over the three of them.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charles demanded, and he was glad to hear Anne echoing his sentiment.

In the argument that followed, Charles got more and more angry.  He’d died making sure Jack wouldn’t hang. He’d made that choice with his eyes open, knowing what might happen.  _Fuck_ Jack for thinking he’d change his mind.

He heard Jack say, “Maybe he’s having second thoughts and making the best of a decision he regrets,” and he was suddenly right in front of Jack, shouting into his oblivious face. 

“Sorry I’m dead, _not_ sorry I saved you, now leave it alone!” 

Jack didn’t hear him, and he kept talking.

The breaking point was when Jack asked Anne, “It _never_ crossed your mind that this might have been a bad trade?  Never wished it had been me instead of him?”

Anne looked like she’d taken a punch to the gut, and if he could have managed it, Charles would have cracked Jack across the jaw hard enough to break it.  He barely even hear what Anne said.  All he knew was that Jack needed to know how furious he was.  And, like remembering how to speak after a knock on the head, he suddenly realized he knew how to do it.  It was good that Anne was angry too.  He stood next to her and let one of his hands sink just a fraction of an inch into her.  He felt her rage, her loss, her fear of being left alone, and he drew on them and added them to his own.  He knew what she was going to say last.  It’s what he would have said, too. 

“ _Fuck_ you, Jack.”

All Charles had to do was _look_ at the glass on “fuck,” and it shattered.

Jack’s face went ashen. “I think he agrees with you.” 

“Fucking right I do!” Charles said. 

“Fucking right he does,” Anne echoed.

Jack bent down and gingerly picked up one of the broken pieces of glass.

“Seems like you need more rum, Charles.  One moment.”  He tossed the shard into the darkness, ducked into the tent, and came out with another cup (metal, this time, Charles noticed).  Without saying a word, Anne handed him the bottle.  Jack set the cup in a place he cleared between himself and Anne, and nestled the pouch of tobacco against the fallen log.  

“Drink up, my friend,” Jack said, filling the cup to the brim.  Anne raised an eyebrow.  Her gifts had always been of a more symbolic size. “A peace offering,” Jack explained.  “You don’t make a man angry and then give him a thimble-full of rum by way of apology.” He glanced around the fire and patted the ground next to him.  “If you’re still there, Charles, spot’s yours, if you want it.”

Charles settled between his friends, and they smiled at each other through him, Jack by way of apology, Anne to let him know he was forgiven.  _That_ was going to take some getting used to.  He dipped a finger in the rum, feeling it around him and in him.   He didn’t know if spirits could get drunk, but tonight seemed like a fine time to find out.


End file.
